We who live west of the Mississippi are familiar with ghost towns. Just in the northern Great Plains, hundreds of small towns were abandoned when a railroad line wasn’t built. More disappeared when highways and air travel led railroads to abandon lines to and through small communities. Farther west is a multitude of abandoned mining […]

Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty may be the most fascinating book I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s the rare book where you think about the subject and have a hard time believing you are so involved with it.

On the surface, Red Plenty is, for lack of a better term, a literary history of […]